Chapter 3: The East Wing

"This is not what I pictured when you said penthouse."

"What did you picture?"

"Something smaller. Something that didn't need its own zip code."

Damian didn't smile, but something in his face loosened, just barely, as he set my suitcase down inside the door.

It was the only bag I'd brought. Everything I owned that mattered fit in one case, which felt like it should embarrass me more than it did, standing in a foyer bigger than my old apartment.

The place hit differently once the elevator doors had closed behind us and it was just the two of us and forty floors of empty air.

Glass walls on two sides. A kitchen with appliances that looked like they'd never made a meal. A chandelier that probably cost more than every apartment I'd ever lived in combined.

I'd expected to feel small in a place like this.

Instead, I mostly felt like an intruder standing in a museum after hours.

"The east wing is yours," he said. "Bedroom, bathroom, a study if you need one. My side of the penthouse is through there."

He nodded toward a hallway on the far side of the living room, lit low, doors closed.

"We don't have to share space unless we're being photographed."

"Comforting boundaries."

"I thought so."

He checked his watch, then seemed to catch himself doing it and stopped.

"Security will brief you tomorrow on protocol... cameras, staff, who's allowed to know you're staying here. Tonight, you can just exist. Might be the last quiet night you get for a while."

I set my bag down slower than I needed to, just to have something to do with my hands.

The apartment, if you could call it that, felt more like a hotel floor someone had decided to live in. It had floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, the city spread out below like something you'd pay to see instead of something you'd wake up to every morning.

"Can I ask you something that isn't about the contract?" I said.

He looked wary, which was fair.

"You can ask."

"Do you actually live here, or do you just own it?"

That got something closer to a real reaction out of him... a short exhale that might have been a laugh in a different life.

"Fair question. I sleep here. I don't know if that's the same thing."

"That's a very sad answer."

"It's an honest one. You said you preferred honest."

"I did."

I walked further into the room, trailing a hand along the back of a couch that looked like it had never been sat on.

"This place doesn't have anything in it. No photos, no books left open, no mug someone forgot to put away. It looks like a hotel that's pretending to be a home."

"I travel a lot."

"That's not an answer either."

He didn't respond right away, but this time it wasn't the loaded, calculating silence from his office.

It was something closer to a man deciding how much of himself he was willing to hand a stranger on her first night in his house.

"I grew up in a house with too much in it," he said finally. "Every room had something in it that meant something to someone. When my father died, I couldn't walk past half of them without..."

He stopped himself.

"I don't keep things anymore. It's simpler."

"That's not simpler. That's just a different kind of full."

He looked at me like I'd said something he hadn't expected to hear tonight, in his own foyer, from the woman he was paying to pretend to love him.

Something about the way he went quiet made me want to keep pulling at the thread, even though every instinct I had said not to.

This was a man who let people in exactly as far as he'd calculated was safe, and no further.

But there was a version of him standing in front of me right now that hadn't been in the office.

Tired around the eyes.

Less armored.

"What was your father like?" I asked before I could talk myself out of it.

"Complicated. Brilliant. Not around enough to know which parts of complicated actually mattered."

He said it like a line he'd used before, worn smooth from repetition, and then something in his face shifted, like he'd surprised himself by adding:

"He would have hated this arrangement, for what it's worth. Not because of you. Because he never trusted contracts to hold together what people wouldn't."

"That's a strange thing to inherit a company from someone who didn't believe in the method you're using to keep it."

"Welcome to my life."

"You're very perceptive for someone with eleven dollars in her checking account."

"I had a lot of time to think back when eleven dollars was a real number I had to worry about."

I shrugged.

"Poverty makes you good at reading rooms. You learn fast who's about to say no before they say it."

"And what am I about to say no to?"

"I don't know yet. That's what makes you interesting instead of just insufferable."

The corner of his mouth moved.

Not a smile, not quite, but close enough that I filed it away as a small win.

"Careful," he said. "Compliments before ten p.m. are apparently also against the rules."

"That was your rule, not mine. I make my own."

"Noted."

He glanced toward the kitchen, then back at me, and for a second he looked less like a man running a company and more like someone who genuinely didn't know what to do with a person standing in his living room past business hours.

"Are you hungry? I don't actually know what you eat. That wasn't in the file."

"There's a file on what I eat?"

"There's a file on everything. I didn't read that part. Seemed excessive, even for me."

"Generous of you."

"I have my limits."

"There's food in the kitchen if you're hungry," he said. "Staff stocked it this afternoon. I have calls to make about the leak, so I'll be in my study most of the night. If you need anything, there's an intercom by your door."

"An intercom. In your own apartment."

"It's a big apartment."

"It's a lonely apartment," I said before I could stop myself.

He didn't argue.

He just held my gaze for a second too long, like he was deciding whether to let that land or wave it off, and then turned toward the hallway without answering either way.

"Goodnight, Mira."

"Goodnight."

I watched him go, waited until his door clicked shut somewhere down the hall, and let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding the whole time we'd been talking.

It was strange.

Twelve hours ago, he'd been a stranger reading my mother's medical history off a folder like it was a grocery list, and now I was standing in his empty, beautiful house, feeling something uncomfortably close to sympathy for him.

I didn't like that.

Sympathy made people careless.

I'd learned that the hard way, more than once.

I stepped into the room that was apparently mine now, expecting the same sterile blankness as the rest of the apartment, and stopped in the doorway instead.

Someone had stocked the small kitchenette tucked into the corner with the exact brand of ginger tea I drank when my stomach was in knots, the kind you couldn't find at most stores.

A worn paperback sat on the nightstand, one of the few novels I'd mentioned once, in passing, during the negotiation, as something I'd been meaning to reread.

I hadn't told Rosa.

I definitely hadn't told Damian directly.

I stood there a moment longer than I meant to, turning that over, before I made myself walk back out to the living room instead of examining it any further tonight.

I sat on the edge of the couch that looked like it had never been sat on and let myself just breathe for a minute.

The city hummed faintly through the glass, the whole apartment quiet in a way that felt less peaceful and more like it was waiting for something.

Then curiosity won, the way it always did with me.

I wandered the living room instead of unpacking, partly out of nerves, partly out of curiosity I couldn't quite talk myself out of.

The place really was as bare as I'd said... no photographs anywhere, no personal clutter, like someone had scrubbed a life out of it on purpose.

I passed a shelf that should have held books and held nothing.

A wall where a family portrait probably used to hang, judging by the faint rectangle of unfaded paint.

Whatever he'd cleared out of this apartment, he'd been thorough about it.

Except for one thing.

At the end of the hallway leading to my wing, past the room I'd been assigned, there was a door that didn't match the others.

Older. Heavier.

With a keypad lock bolted onto it, where every other door in the apartment used a simple handle.

It looked out of place... like it belonged to a different building entirely, one that had been standing a lot longer than this glass tower had.

I stood in front of it longer than I meant to, doing the math on how strange it was that a man who owned an entire floor of a skyscraper had exactly one door in his home that needed a code to open.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I already knew before I looked at it who it was going to be from.

I see you found it. Ask him what happened in that room the night of the fire. Ask him why it's the only door in that entire apartment that locks from the outside.

I looked down the hallway toward the room, then back at the closed door where Damian had disappeared, and felt the same cold settle

into my chest that I'd felt reading clause fourteen for the first time.

Behind me, so close I nearly dropped my phone, a voice said,

"You shouldn't be standing there."

I spun around.

It wasn't Damian.